How Low Can It Go? – Epilogue

Legacy blog posts Polls in the News

Two days of airports and MP continues to play catch-up at the office, so just another quickie post today:

Today’s streaming video “Daily Briefing” from Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport provides a helpful epilogue to our “How Low Can It Go” post from last week.  They checked available presidential approval ratings for the four other presidents in their second term and compared George W. Bush to other presidents in their “19th quarter.”  The results:  At 44% approval, Bush is scoring lower than Presidents Eisenhower (60%), Reagan (61%), Clinton (59%) but better than Nixon (32%).   As always, the Gallup Daily Briefing is free to all until the stroke of midnight.   

Keep in mind that in the third quarter of 1973, the Nixon administration was reeling from a summer of blockbuster testimony and disclosures stemming from the Senate Watergate hearings.  However, MP’s search of the Gallup archives suggests that the “19th quarter” numbers came just before the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre” in late October 1973 in which Nixon fired the Watergate Special Prosecutor and others.   

UPDATE:  As I was writing this, CNN released a new set of presidental approval numbers from Gallup. 

Mark Blumenthal

Mark Blumenthal is the principal at MysteryPollster, LLC. With decades of experience in polling using traditional and innovative online methods, he is uniquely positioned to advise survey researchers, progressive organizations and candidates and the public at-large on how to adapt to polling’s ongoing reinvention. He was previously head of election polling at SurveyMonkey, senior polling editor for The Huffington Post, co-founder of Pollster.com and a long-time campaign consultant who conducted and analyzed political polls and focus groups for Democratic party candidates.